Monday, November 19, 2012

'The team also wanted the machine to be easy to use, and recruited Yoav Reches, an industrial designer who had previously worked on mobile phone designs for Samsung to help formulate the entire printing process.

Reches says “Existing 3-D printers cannot live in the office because they are too clumsy and messy. A friend of mine has a printer in his living room and when I visit him I see bits of plastic all over the living room.” He continues, “We’re dealing with resin, which is more complex than building with extruded material, so we felt we had to take responsibility for that.” This led the team to develop an included cleaning station called the “Form Finish Kit,” simplifying the parts cleaning process.

According to Lobovsky, the resin is safe, but should be treated like bleach or epoxy – it’s fine to use in the home, but unsupervised children probably shouldn’t be playing with it. Eventually, there will be multiple resins available in different colors and with special properties, e.g., materials that can be melted in lost wax casting.

With light-based printing, resin prices are one of the unknown variables. Cranor estimates the resin will cost about $149 per liter, but says “Kickstarter supporters who buy a Form 1 print package will be guaranteed at least 1 liter per month for $129 ($0.13 per cubic centimeter) or cheaper for the life of their printer.” This is approximately three times more expensive than Makerbot-style extrusion printing; however, bigger companies charge between $300 and $800 per liter, and you can pay 10 times that with online print services.